Margo Seltzer, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Oracle

Anand Sivasubramaniam, Pennsylvania State University

John Strunk, NetApp

Steve Swanson, University of California, San Diego

Michael Swift, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Eno Thereska, Microsoft Research

Dan Tsafrir, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology

Joseph Tucek, HP Labs

Andrew Warfield, University of British Columbia

Ric Wheeler, Red Hat

Catherine Zhang, IBM Research

Pin Zhou, IBM Almaden Research

Tutorial Chair

John Strunk, NetApp

Poster Session Coordinator

Nitin Agrawal, NEC Labs

Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs) Coordinator

Joseph Tucek, HP Labs

Steering Committee

Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin—Madison

William J. Bolosky, Microsoft Research

Randal Burns, Johns Hopkins University

Anne Dickison, USENIX Association

Jason Flinn, University of Michigan

Greg Ganger, Carnegie Mellon University

Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University and Panasas

Kimberly Keeton, HP Labs

Darrell Long, University of California, Santa Cruz

Jai Menon, IBM Research

Erik Riedel, EMC

Margo Seltzer, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Oracle

Ric Wheeler, Red Hat

John Wilkes, Google

Overview

The 11th USENIX Conference on File and Storage
Technologies (FAST '13) brings together storage-system researchers and
practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation,
evaluation, and deployment of storage systems. The program committee will
interpret “storage systems” broadly; everything from low-level storage devices
to information management is of interest. The conference will consist of
technical presentations, including refereed papers, Work-in-Progress (WiP)
reports, poster sessions, and tutorials.

FAST accepts both full-length and short papers.
Both types of submissions are reviewed to the same standards and differ
primarily in the scope of the ideas expressed. Short papers are limited to half
the space of full-length papers. The program committee will not accept a full
paper on the condition that it is cut down to fit in a short paper slot, nor
will it invite short papers to be extended to full length. Submissions will be
considered only in the category in which they are submitted.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Archival
storage systems

Auditing
and provenance

Caching,
replication, and consistency

Cloud
storage

Data
deduplication

Database
storage

Distributed
I/O (wide-area, grid, peer-to-peer)

Empirical
evaluation of storage systems

Experience
with deployed systems

File
system design

Key-value
and NoSQL storage

Memory-only
storage systems

Mobile
and personal storage

Parallel
I/O

Power-aware
storage architectures

RAID and
erasure coding

Reliability,
availability, and disaster tolerance

Search
and data retrieval

Solid
state storage technologies and uses (e.g., flash, PCM)

Storage
management

Storage
performance and QoS

Storage
security

The
challenges of “big data”

Submission
Instructions

Please submit paper titles and abstracts by 9:00 p.m. PDT on September 18,
2012, via the Web form. Full
and short paper submissions (no extended abstracts), must be submitted by 9:00
p.m. PDT on September 24, 2012, in PDF format via the Web form also. Do not
email submissions.

The
complete submission must be no longer than twelve (12) pages for full papers
and six (6) for short papers, excluding references. The program
committee will value conciseness, so if an idea can be expressed in fewer pages
than the limit, please do so. Papers should be typeset in two-column format in
10 point Times Roman type on 12 point leading (single-spaced), with the text
block being no more than 6.5" wide by 9" deep. As references do not
count against the page limit, they should not be set in a smaller font. Submissions
that violate any of these restrictions will not be reviewed. The limits
will be interpreted strictly. No extensions will be given for reformatting.

There are
no formal restrictions on the use of color in graphs or charts, but please use
them sparingly—not everybody has access to a color printer.

Authors
must not be identified in the submissions, either explicitly or by implication.
When it is necessary to cite your own work, cite it as if it were written by a
third party. Do not say "reference removed for blind review."

Simultaneous
submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously
published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like
other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these
practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the
USENIX Conference
Submissions Policy for details.

Papers
accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered.

The program committee and external reviewers will judge papers on
technical merit, significance, relevance, and presentation. A good paper will demonstrate that the
authors:

are
attacking a significant problem,

have
devised an interesting, compelling solution,

have
demonstrated the practicality and benefits of the solution,

have
drawn appropriate conclusions,

have
clearly described what they have done, and

have
clearly articulated the advances beyond previous work.

Blind reviewing of all papers will be done by the
program committee, assisted by outside referees when necessary. Each accepted
paper will be shepherded through an editorial review process by a member of the
program committee.

Authors will be notified of paper acceptance or
rejection no later than Thursday, December 6, 2012. If your paper is accepted
and you need an invitation letter to apply for a visa to attend the conference,
please contact conference@usenix.org as soon
as possible. (Visa applications can take at least 30 working days to process.)
Please identify yourself as a presenter and include your mailing address in
your email.

All papers will be available online to registered
attendees, no earlier than January 16, 2013. If your accepted paper should not
be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The
papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the first day of the
main conference, February 13, 2013. Accepted submissions will be treated as
confidential prior to publication on the USENIX FAST ’13 Web site;
rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

By submitting a paper, you agree that at least one of the authors will
attend the conference to present it. If the conference registration fee will pose a
hardship for the presenter of the accepted paper, please contact conference@usenix.org.

Best
Paper Awards

Awards will be given for the best paper(s) at the conference. A small,
selected set of papers will be forwarded for publication in ACM Transactions
on Storage (TOS) via a fast-path editorial process. Both full and short
papers will be considered.

Test of
Time Award

We will award a FAST paper from a conference at least ten years
earlier with the “Test of Time” award, in recognition of its lasting
impact on the field.

Work-in-Progress
Reports and Poster Sessions

The FAST technical sessions will include a slot for
short Work-in-Progress (WiP) reports presenting preliminary results and opinion
statements. We are particularly interested in presentations of student work and
topics that will provoke informative debate. While WiP proposals will be
evaluated for appropriateness, they are not peer reviewed in the same sense
that papers are.

We will also hold poster sessions each evening. WiP
submissions will automatically be considered for a poster slot, and authors of
all accepted full papers will be asked to present a poster on their paper.
Other poster submissions are very welcome.

Arrangements for submitting posters and WiPs will be announced later.

Birds-of-a-Feather
Sessions

Birds-of-a-Feather sessions (BoFs) are informal gatherings organized by
attendees interested in a particular topic; they are held in the evenings. BoFs
may be scheduled in advance by emailing the Conference Department at
bofs@usenix.org. BoFs may also be scheduled at the conference.